Hearts and Minds
by blue weekends
Summary: Trapped behind enemy lines, G36 and MP40 try to find their way back home.


Hearts and Minds

* * *

Every single one of them was cute, perky and beaming a million-watt smile.

They came in jeeps and vans every day from outside the city, delivering food, medicine, and toys to the impoverished and the sick. They walked the streets in their echelons, chatting with the civilian populace, happy to stop for selfies and delighted to kiss a baby. They were dressed in silk, in lace, in ribbons, and in leather. They dressed the part of the pin-up model, the café maid, and the swimsuit babe. They could sing, they could dance and they could sell the cynical and the wise the most outrageous lies.

"Just smile and wave, girls," the G36 whispered with a grin plastered on her face. A kid hugged her leg. Someone wolf-whistled and yelled at her to lift her skirt. A camera flashed in her eyes. "Smile and wave," she repeated as she patted the kid's head and blew a kiss at the gathering crowd.

"I'm trying," MP40 replied as she adjusted her lapels and made sure she didn't lose another medal again. She watched as an AK-47 lifted what could be a little sister to her shoulder, took off her red beret and placed it on the girl's head to approval from her parents. She looked away as a Honey Badger and an MT-9 linked arms with half a dozen schoolboys for a photo, the two Dolls laughing and smacking hands aside as they wandered a little too far.

MP40 imagined holding her namesake up in the air and unloading the entire magazine into the sky. The mental image of the people running away in terror from the sound of 9x19 Parabellum being rapidly discharged filled her with a strange emotion before she realized she left her firearm back in the jeep.

"Just remember our instructions," G36 said before hurrying off to join a nearby PPK who was doing an admirable job of holding off a walker's Labrador who had taken a liking to her with tongue and nose and was about to topple her over.

The kid that was hugging G36's thigh turned his attention to MP40, jolting her out of her introspection. "Missus," he said. "Can you give me a piggyback?"

"No I will most certainly not give you a piggybank," MP40 answered.

The boy's face twitched. His eyes swelled up with the prepared onslaught of a tearful, wailing tantrum. A code black. MP40 turned around and stooped. The boy gave a cry of delight and hopped onto her back, nearly hitting his knee against her neck.

The main challenge to all brushfire (low-intensity conflict) warfare was guerrilla opposition, and so a necessary requirement for the successful subjugation of hostile communities was rigorous employment of propaganda in all its forms to appeal to the good nature of the populace. This was to maintain media support both local and abroad and cut off guerilla recruitment drives.

As such, Grifon & Kryuger, with its status as a private military contractor and its reputation for fielding civilian-model T-Dolls in combat settings, found a niche market where their services saw none of the competition that they would normally face. Naturally, they exploited it with trademark ruthlessness, securing contracts from clients who found themselves lacking the soft touch required to quelling rebellious sentiment and reducing the risk of an uprising.

The feelings of the T-Dolls at being employed for such operations were not taken into consideration.

MP40 let the boy ride on her back for half an hour as she and the other T-Dolls in their echelon paraded themselves around the district before his parents found them and took him off her hands. All the attention the boy had demanded of her had distracted her and made her wander off from the main group as she regaled the boy with stories she made up on the spot and jokes that were only as funny as loud as she could laugh. As such, she had accidentally split off from the main group, so she promptly scoured the crowd as she looked to rejoin her compatriots. She looked towards the distance noticed that the sun was going down.

That was when she felt the fragmentation grenade go off, rocking the ground and staggering her. The sound came next, and it deafened even her electronic auditory system. The screams of the bystanders came next, and that was when the second grenade exploded.

Their echelon had arrived in a pair of jeeps which they had parked at the end of the road next to a flower shop. As MP40 returned, she found that both vehicles were alight, the metal melting and the engines in flames. Lying about were several T-Dolls who had been caught in the blast and riddled with the thrown fragments.

"A little hand here?" AK-47 shouted as she helped a crumpled Honey Badger up and onto her shoulder. "_Hurry, that engine's going to blow!_"

MP40 ran forward to one of the bodies lying face down a few steps away from one of the burning jeeps. MP40 turned her over and looked away. It was MT-9. Several shards of metal had caught her right in the face, one poking out from an eye and two others gaping out of cheek and forehead. MP40 lifted her up bridal-style and turned to run.

"RPG!" Someone screamed.

MP40 remembered flying forward and MT-9 falling from her arms as the world turned to flame in a rush of heat and a vacuum of sound. Next thing she knew, she was lying on the sidewalk with her vision going dimming and darkening, her system readings swimming in her vision as numbers and letters and error messages all blurred together in one psychedelic carnival. She had hit her head for massive concussion. She had suffered what a human would call second and third-degree burns. Dangerous, even fatal to them but not as much to her. Even so, her artificial nervous system was all alight like a Christmas tree in her mind's eye.

Dazed, she got to her knee and no sooner than she did so, someone had run by and was shaking her shoulders urgently. MP40 pushed their hands away, looked up and met G36's gaze, whose face was covered in soot with the maid headpiece askew. She was shouting but no words were coming out of her mouth. MP40 tried to tell her and was only given a look of confusion. G36 shouted again and the ringing in MP40's ears subsided long enough for her to hear what the other Doll was saying and understand the situation they were currently in.

Insurgents. They were being attacked by insurgents.

They had no weapons, no transport and they were being attacked by an unknown number of hostile combatants armed with heavy ordnance.

In a nutshell, sitrep had gone from a milk run to FUBAR.

With that revelation, MP40 let herself be dragged to her feet by G36. As MP40's hearing returned, she heard gunfire nearby, and as she turned to look to the source, she could make out faint figures emerging from the smoke, their silhouettes thrown up in stark contrast to the fires burning around the street. They wore balaclavas and fatigues with ammo pouches and bulletproof vests. They were executing the T-Dolls as they milled about frantically in confusion. Shots ringing out and bodies dropping as they were riddled with lead. Some T-Dolls recovered and fought back and MP40 could see them tackling around the waist or leaping upon the back of their assailants as they tried to wrest the guns from their grasp. They were clubbed aside and thrown off. More shots rang out.

Lumbering step by step, MP40 felt herself being pulled away from the fray as the sounds of fighting slowly but surely grew fainter and more distant. MP40's sight went dark, and when it refreshed, she was looking down at red carpet overlaying tiled mosaic floor. She looked up and saw the reception area of a hotel and more people striding and jogging for safety. As they passed the desk, MP40 saw the cord of a phone leading down and underneath, where the receptionist huddled as she dialed for emergency services.

Staggering under G36's arm, MP40 went with her into one of the elevators, where they promptly collapsed as the door closed behind them. MP40 watched as G36 scooted over to the buttons and held down both the one for the top floor and the one to close the door so the elevator couldn't be stopped as it went up.

"You think the others are alright?" MP40 heard herself ask. She could feel her systems rebooting, the result being that she could feel herself drifting in and out of sleep mode, all her faculties delayed if not debilitated and giving her what she likened to their equivalent of a hangover. She would later berate herself for asking such a question.

"I don't know," G36 coldly answered. Standard protocol, when attacked by unknown assailants, was to cease all channels of communications lest they were being monitored by the enemy. MP40 remembered it being mentioned in their operation briefing that the guerillas had access to electronic surveillance equipment. Try as MP40 might, even knowing that it was against procedure, none of the Dolls in their echelon responded to her hails. Which meant that they had remembered their instructions and ceased all communications except for word of mouth.

Or that they were all dead and G36 and she were the only ones left in their echelon.

What followed was a total of 6.34 seconds on both Doll's internal clock before the elevator door cheerfully chimed to let them know that they have arrived on their floor.

It felt longer. Much longer.

As the doors opened, MP40 stood up and stumbled after G36 as she led them both down the corridor. The Doll stopped by a room, tried the doorknob and moved on if the door was locked. She repeated this process several times. Then she gave up, and drove her heel into side of the frame near the lock. She kicked once, twice and thrice, and then the door swung forward and G36 pulled MP40 inside. She had picked a door next to the stairway, in case they had to make a prompt escape later on.

As MP40 staggered in to fall against the wall in a corner of the room, G36 hustled about and dragged furniture to brace against the door: a wardrobe, a bookshelf, and a coffee table. When she was done, she went over to the balcony. A few moments later, MP40 heard her call for her to come over. She did so reluctantly, and as she came to stand by the balustrade with her fellow Doll, MP40 watched the landscape of the city and saw the fires dotted all the way out to the harbor and the pillars of smoke rising into the air. Ahead of them was a boulevard stretching down the street. As they watched, they saw the humans dragging the bodies away.

"Hearts and minds," she murmured as they heard the crackle of distant gunfire and the boom of distant explosives. More jeeps exploding, more Dolls finding themselves cut off and assaulted in what they thought was a simple peacekeeping operation.

"Hearts and minds," G36 echoed as the sirens wailed in the distance.


End file.
